Smart AI Campaigns Core Training
Known Conflicts: There are certain plugins or types of plugins that may conflict with Smart AI Campaigns. I will try to ameliorate and modify code where I can to avoid conflicts, but certain coding practices of other plugins may make it impossible. I have already identifed the following plugins as having irreconcilable conflicts with Smart AI Campaigns:
- Midhan's Index Now
- Link Whisperer
- Instant Indexer (standalone)
- Instant Indexing in Rank Math (just a setting - turn it off)
- will add more as they are identified
These types of plugin conflict with an auto-blogger because they hijack the interpreter right after any post is created, usually to grab the permalink and do something with it. Unfortunately they are not coded to give the process back to the calling procedure so it's really a hijack of the process.
Smart AI Campaigns #1: Intro & What is a Campaign
Smart AI Campaigns #2: Campaign Controls
Smart AI Campaigns #3: Images for your Campaign
Smart AI Campaigns #4: Tracking Campaign Results
Smart AI Campaigns #5: Some Campaign Strategy Ideas
Smart AI Campaigns Training
1. Introduction
Hello and welcome to Smart AI Campaigns! You are going to love how this add-on keeps your site humming with new content regularly.
You'll be able to set up campaigns that repeat posting, yet never repeat content so your site will stay fresh and full of diverse, interesting content.
I will show you all the ins and outs of how to use Smart AI Campaigns to your best benefit going forward, so when you're doing with this training you're going to know how to create a campaign, what strategy to use for what purpose, and all the settings that go along with that.
So let's get started with the training, shall we?
2. What is a Campaign?
A campaign is basically a set of instructions for a recurring content creation event. What I mean by that is that Smart AI Campaigns will create an event, based on the timing settings, that occurs say every day, or every week - however you've set it. So the event is based on a particular time interval having passed since the last event. And of course you set that time interval in the campaign settings.
So when that time interval elapses, Smart AI Campaigns executes its function, which is to create and post a piece of content based on your instructions. These instructions include what type of content, whether it's a blog post, or a long article, or a story - whichever you choose.
3. Campaign Controls
The first field in the Add/Edit Campaign Dialog is for what I call the nickname. This is the friendly name you give to the campaign that helps you remember it in a list or a search. That nickname is never shown to the public in any way, so you can make it whatever you want.
The next important element of the Campaign is the category and you'll see a listing of categories from your blog right next to the nickname field. The way Smart AI Campaigns is designed, is that each campaign is locked to one particular category on your blog, so that every piece of content generated by that particular campaign will be posted under that particular category.
And to be even clearer - Smart AI Campaigns does not post Pages, only posts. That's why there is always a category. If a category is not selected, a post will by default go under WordPress' Uncategorized category. So it's not only important, but it's a strategic, to select the category when designing a campaign. I'll talk about reasons for that later on in this training.
Next to the categories dropdown, there is a switch to turn the campaign on and off. You can leave the campaign disabled here if you want to spend a little time working on it or even if you just want to pause it for a while for any reason.
Just by the way - you can also change the settings for any campaign at any time, and it will resume posting with the new settings when you save it.
The second row of controls starts out with Smart AI Content Creator's standard selector for types of content - for example, a blog post, an article, a story, or something more hypey like an ad or a sales page. Next to that is the Style field, which was discussed in the main Smart AI Content Creator training. To get all those details, please refer to the main training.
On the next line you'll see a larger text area, which is where you will enter YOUR instructions for what you want the campaign to write about when it posts. There is some art to setting up the information in this field, I'm planning a live webinar to go over some of the strategies but I'll also cover a few later in this training.
But again to understand the fundamental way that this field works, you should refer to the main training for Smart AI Content Creator. However, I will point out one BIG difference in Smart AI Campaigns - you can actually use spintax for this field. Just to be clear, you cannot use Spintax in the main Creator or post assistant - but you CAN use it in Smart AI Campaigns. And to be even more clear - this does not spin any text. All it does is spin the command you are going to send to the AI API partner.
Here's an example, although it's kind of childish, it illustrates the function: you've set up your campaign to write one story every day. In the About box, you put spintax. Normally it all goes on one line but I’ve broken it down into multiple lines so you can get a handle on the spintax:
a {frog|mouse|horse|pony|dog}
was
{walking|playing|running|falling down|jumping|swimming}
in
{the forest|a lake|a mountain|a cave|an island|a sand dune}
in
{summer|winter|spring|fall}
So you’d actually put that as the following:
a {frog|mouse|horse|pony|dog} was {walking|playing|running|falling down|jumping|swimming} in {the forest|a lake|a mountain|a cave|an island|a sand dune} in {summer|winter|spring|fall}
So when the spintax is interpreted by our back end system, the AI API Partner might be asked to write a story about a frog playing in a cave in winter, and the next day it might be about a mouse falling down in the forest in summer. That's pretty basic, but you can come up with some amazingly diverse possible combinations to keep things interesting.
Also please note that I will be implementing an AI based function to create that spintax for you based on your input - coming soon in a service release later this year.
Then we have the images - I'll cover that in the next section. Under the images settings, are your scheduling controls. Currently we offer daily, two times daily, weekly, and monthly posting. Your campaign will start pretty much as soon as you save it and make it active, and going forward, will post approximately the same time of day that you originally set the campaign going.
So if you turned on a daily campaign at 5pm Monday, it will post when you turn it on, and then again on Tuesday, close to 5pm and daily onwards.
The next set of controls has to do with time of day and a few other details, these are currently not in service but will be enabled in an upcoming service release this year.
So once you are happy with your settings, simply click the Save Campaign button, and your campaign appears as a line item in the campaign listing that appears once you close the Add Campaign dialog.
Once your campaign is listed as a line item in the Campaigns listing, you can reopen it by clicking on the pencil icon, or delete it by clicking the trash icon.
4. Campaign Image Settings
In your campaign, you have two options for images for your posts: by default, the "Create images by AI" checkbox is already ticked. But you can untick that box, and you'll see a button which will open your media library so you can choose multiple existing images to assign to the campaign instead of creating new images by AI. It's up to you!
If you choose to create the images by AI, you have all the same controls that you have in the other areas of Smart AI Content Creator. The only difference is that you don't have to provide any description of the image - the system does that for you when it creates the article, post, story or whatever. You do have a huge influence, however, over the resulting look that is generated, especially in the dropdown for the image algorithm or engine.
Especially some of the selections lower in the dropdown - the ones from Deep AI -- create very highly stylized, custom image styles. For example the 3d Objects algorithm creates images in a very isometric style. So by picking the image algorithm engine alone you're setting the visual style for the entire website, in a way. You can also choose an image filter selection or an artist style to try to apply to your auto - created images. I suggest you try those settings out in the regular creator before you assign them to a campaign - some of them might not work too well while some of them are absolutely amazing. But try it first before putting it on auto pilot.
5. Campaign Posts History
To view posts created by your campaigns, navigate to the section called Posts under Smart AI see see menu. You will see a listing of every post made by a campaign, including the image assigned as featured image and the title or headline of the post. In most cases the status will say "processed" but you may rarely catch one that's still marked "pending" while the system grabs the text and creates the image.
You'll also see the date of the post - you can sort by that as well as the Title and the ID. At the end of each line item in the listing is a set of controls. Currently there are only two controls - I intend to flesh the entire plugin out with a lot more functionality. But for now, you have the two controls to view the post or edit the post.
Depending on how you normally do your blogging, you may want to edit and tweak each post. You can easily do so just by going down the list on this page and hitting the pencil icon to open any post in the post editor. From there you'll have all the WordPress tools as well as the Smart AI Post writing assistant to do any tweaks, additions or edits.
6. Campaign Strategies
WordPress is amazing in that you can put just about anything you want into the sidebar, top header or bottom footer, so that any material you want, including monetized links, can be shown to any visitor just by putting them into a widget. So truly, just by posting great content you can be monetized on every page just by making sure you have great widgets on your website.
That having been said, right now Smart AI Campaigns posts straight content without any type of monetization link, unless you specify it in the details. You can in fact instruct the AI to add in a link, however I plan on programming a VERY effective system for integrating your auto-blogging with affiliate links, PBN links and other ways of leveraging your business directly within the content generated by the Smart AI Campaigns.
We have to start somewhere, though, and so now we have a fairly basic system that you can game somewhat with smart spinning in the details box. Just FYI - I also will be adding in soon a system where you just use the AI to create your spun commands. But for now, we do that manually.
Strategy 1: the Daily / two times Daily Spintax Content Strategy
If you are going to post content every day, you need to be sure the content is going to be quite diverse, so it doesn't look like the system is repeating itself. The way we accomplish this is by intelligent use of spintax in the "about" box in the add Campaign dialog. I've already shown you how to do that in the previous lesson so I won't go over it again here.
But suffice it to say that you should spend some time thinking out exactly how to get the most diverse commands every day to the system by spinning out those campaigns. Let me share some of my examples with you on screen:
Strategy 2: The Simple Daily "Pick a Topic" Content Strategy
Another way to ensure that the articles aren't TOO similar, is just to ask the system to choose a topic itself. For example, on one of my blogs, the main niche was Dogs so I just entered "pick a simple topic about how dogs affect our lives in some way" and I let it use that without any spinning at all. And while the posts are somewhat similar in feel, they never have the same title or topic. It actually works quite well. So you can get away without doing too much work and get some nice diverse results.
Strategy 3: Multiple Weekly Campaigns
I think maybe my best advice though, would be rather than creating one campaign that blasts itself every day trying to think of something new, instead create it as a weekly campaign, and then create more weekly campaigns with just different topics. Then it really doesn't look like you're posting the same topic over and over again every day.
This is also your best way to set up affiliate marketing campaigns: do one or more weekly campaigns. That way you can also do campaigns for different products. Because you can set up your campaign with all your product info including the affiliate link. You could have multiple images of the product in your media library and choose those instead of using AI to create the images. You could set up a number of weekly campaigns, one for each of multiple products, each one having all the product details, affiliate link and product images programmed into the Add Campaign dialog. You could do like one each day for a week, and then by default they will post one post every day of the week. Or you can use the day controls ( they are going to be implmented shortly ).
7: Known Issues You Should Be Aware Of
If you are trying to run campaigns or Silos and it is failing or causing errors on your server, one of the most common causes is that you have so many plugins on your blog that when Smart AI Campaigns / Silo Factory tries to do its work in the background, your other plugins are taking time to do other tasks and then when it's time for Smart AI to do its work, the server process can time out and this causes a Server Error 500 or may show some other error.
I know that Smart AI Campaigns works just fine but as the developer, I have many, many dedicated blogs which are not being dedicated to a lot of other plugins. Sometimes when I review the back end of my customers' WordPress sites, I am astonished at the amount of plugins that are being employed, some for the tinyest purpose. But that's certainly your prerogative - you can have as many plugins as you want. I will be working to minimize the footprint of Smart AI Campaigns, so you can look forward to more and more streamlined solutions for content creation, and who knows, I may come up with some genius solution 🙂
But in the meantime and all that having been said, my recommendation is that if you have a blog that you specifically want auto-blogging and it doesn't seem to be working, or causing issues, you should examine your plugins and see which other plugins may be dominating the back end process. As I mentioned above, the website has a specific time-out period - usually 30 seconds. We in no way want to use up 30 seconds of bandwidth, but a user of Smart AI Campaigns should realize that probably in two to three out of half a million requests to your blog, and actually even more frequently if you've just created a silo with auto-generated content - Smart AI Campaigns will need to do some work, and that entails reaching out to our middleware server a few times to grab the content, including images.
So both campaigns and silos depend on availability of bandwidth to do their work, and if another plugin or other plugins have used up the bandwidth for the requests, then actually what might happen is that your web server can terminate the entire process - like a dead kill - right at the hard limit set, maybe before Campaigns work gets done, such as database saves and that sort of thing. I'm going to be programming in a section where you can see more clearly what's going on with Campaigns shortly. I'll also be looking into mitigate this kind of issue on our side.
But remember WordPress is a community and the more plugins you put into the mix, the more unknown coding and usage you are also putting. I will tell you that if you schedule content, either by Smart AI Campaigns or Silo Factory, you will need to allow JUST a little bandwidth for Smart AI to do its work.
So the bottom line, I think, is that if you really want awesome auto-blogging with Smart AI Campaigns, and it doesn't seem to be working, your next step is to either disable a bunch of plugins and just let Smart AI Campaigns run for a while until you get it tweaked, OR move to another blog whose process you can dedicate more closely to Smart AI Campaigns. I think a lot of little plugins can be replaced by a more up to date theme that contains a lot of the same functions that you're looking for. My $.02 🙂
8: Conclusion
I believe that just about wraps up all the important details I needed to share with you about Smart AI Campaigns for you to get started and hit the ground running. I will be holding live demo training Zoom meetings so look for those soon.
Also I want you to know you can look forward to a lot of great improvements, enhancements and upgrades for Smart AI Campaigns coming in the upcoming days! I use all my own software so I know what I need to do to make it better. Thanks again and I'll see you on the live zoom calls!
OpenAI api key can be obtained here - https://openai.com
DeepAI api key can be obtained here - https://deepai.org
Riku api key can be obtained here - https://portal.riku.ai/